


We're all Fairy Tales, or The Many Lives of Melody Pond

by Sergia



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Brainwashing, Child Abuse, Double Drabble, Gen, Here there be psychopaths, It's not not canon, Regeneration, Semi-graphic violence, Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-14
Updated: 2012-12-31
Packaged: 2017-11-21 03:22:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 16
Words: 3,200
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/592881
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sergia/pseuds/Sergia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When she’s twelve – the real kind of twelve – Madame Kovarian tells her one last story about an innocent child abandoned by her parents because they would rather travel with Him. That’s when Melody first learns how to die.</p><p>Double drabble series</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Real Kind of Twelve

**Author's Note:**

> Based on the premise that seeing Melody regenerate twice doesn't mean she didn't do so more often (because I love making my heroines suffer)
> 
> Comments, critics and suggestions are always welcome!
> 
> Oh yeah: not mine in any way, shape or form but oh how I wish

In her first body they tell her fairy tales. Tales about goblins and tricksters and wizards, who are not really goblins or tricksters or wizards, but just a man. One man who decides who lives and dies, who sacrifices the many for the few, and the few for the many. And he is clever and brilliant and mad and who made him God anyway?

Whole galaxies are drenched in blood because of him, entire races extinct. He finds princes and princesses – noble and mortal – and forges them into weapons. Leaves them behind when they have fulfilled their purpose.

He is the evil witch who gave Snow White the apple, the old woman who stuck Hans and Gretel into the oven, the goblin with the hidden name. He steals planets and stars and children and parents. And love and hope and innocence. For those he touches there are no happily ever afters, for some there are no longer beginnings.

And she hates him.

When she’s twelve – the real kind of twelve – Madame Kovarian tells her one last story about an innocent child, abandoned by her parents because they would rather travel with _him_. That’s when Melody first learns how to die.


	2. Never Quite Enough

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Additional warning: Character suicide

Her next body is older. Tall and strong and muscular. They teach her how to fight. She fights with her hands and feet, with knives, guns, and sticks. She thinks it’s rather pointless because the Doctor doesn’t fight that way. He fights with words, she tells them.

They beat her again and again until she surrenders and becomes the best warrior they’ve ever seen.

Then they teach her about poison. She spends weeks with her nose in books to learn names and symptoms and antidotes. The next six months they build up her immunity, injecting her continuously with doses of various poisons and drugs – never quite enough to just kill her.

She spends so much time with her head in the loo, so much time aching _everywhere_ that by the fourth month she tries to kill herself.

At the end of the sixth she sweet-talks her guard within three feet of her bed. She has just enough strength to free one of her hands and snatch his gun. He lunges for her and though the poisons have all but fried her mind they did train her well. The first bullet buries into the guard’s chest.

The second into Melody’s temple.


	3. It's All about the Curriculum

They finish the immunity treatments in her third body, but she handles them better now. Maybe because this body is mature – finished. Or maybe because her previous lives are filed away behind doors in her head. The memories aren’t quite there if she doesn’t want them to be.

Still she knows how to fight and now they decide it’s time for her to kill. She’s send into wars across time and space. First they dump her right in the middle of a Dalek battleship. She only barely dodges the first couple of blasts, but when one of the creatures hits her arm a cold kind of anger comes over her and her training kicks in.

Many more battles follow.

Afterwards they make her watch footage and tell her what she did wrong. When she doesn’t listen (she did after all take down the targets so honestly who cares if she could’ve been a bit more precise, a bit quicker here and there) they beat her some more.

The wounds she sustains heal on their own and she wears the scars proudly.

Now that she hates him and knows how to fight, poison and kill, they teach her how to die.


	4. A Whole Army of Weapons

She blows through her fourth, fifth and sixth incarnations In a matter of weeks. They don’t try anything radical like beheading or electrocution because it wouldn’t do to irrevocably kill this weapon they’ve put so much time and energy into.

Instead the focus is on studying the process. They try to siphon off the golden energy that expels from her and she might just feel a little gleeful when it wipes out the entire medical team present (even though she is punished for that too).

The second try is all about slowing down the process. Regeneration is not exactly a pleasant sensation to start with – they draw it out for days with drugs and energy fields. When she begs them to please just end it, Kovarian only laughs at her.

They cut her fifth body at precise intervals, sometimes down to her bones just to see how the injuries in various stages of healing react to regeneration. Most of her blood is drained for reasons she doesn’t want to think about.

In her sixth form she hears murmurs of longevity-in-a-bottle and DNA-modification and clones. A whole army of weapons like her. Melody thinks she might like not to be alone.


	5. Star-crossed Somethings

It’s when she regenerates again (this time they use only pain, building it layer upon layer like a twisted birthday cake until she doesn’t know anything but the searing agony that permeates into every pore, every cell and neuron. It’s weeks or months before her primary heart finally gives out) that she suddenly realizes how long she’s been poked and prodded and injured and hurt.

This is when she realizes how much she knows, how much of her lives she can’t quite remember and how very much he’s still alive. “Let me kill him,” she begs.

“Soon,” Kovarian says.

But this self is impatient and quick and really not a very obedient weapon at all. She’s lean and just a little short and very clever. She kills half a dozen guards on her way out of the base, hitches (okay, hi-jacks) a ride off world.

She finds him a week later by pure chance on an odd-ball planet in the middle of nowhere. There’s a young, blonde thing keeping him company in a four-dimensional arcade.

 It’s easy to cross a few wires that shouldn’t be crossed and as Melody steps out into the sun, the place blows up behind her.


	6. Cry Me a River

He doesn’t die (of course he doesn’t), but 183 other people do. Seeing how she wasn’t terribly cautious about the whole thing, there are three universal justice agencies looking for her. Never mind eight planetary ones.

Other than her appearance nothing ties her to the scene, so it’s not a big surprise that another death, another new face is part of her punishment. She might finally have become immune to pain. Even regeneration starts to feel like a pleasant muscle-ache after a thorough workout.

But this body, her (her eighth? She lost track) is so very young. Suddenly she has to look up at everyone and her memories are only shadows swishing in the back of her mind. Illusive, too complicated to grasp.

When they try to make her fight, she cries.

This time they can’t beat her into surrender. They tell her stories about evil tricksters and child-eating goblins instead. She’s moved into a humid and dark house where a spaceman tries to eat her.

The spaceman will go away, they promise, if she’ll just fight and maim and kill. She only cries. Weapons won’t kill the trickster.

“What will?” Kovarian asks finally.

And Melody tells her a story.


	7. Once upon a Time

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This might be my favourite one yet

Melody is a clever girl. A girl with aliens in her mind and spacemen chasing her. There are stories in her head that make her sad and thoughts she can’t quite grasp. Some way or another she’s always hurting and always, always alone.

Only her stories keep her company and oh she’s come up with a good one. A story of love and hope and friendship. A story in which everyone lives _but_ him.

A _brilliant_ story.

“Once upon a time there was a box. Not an ordinary box. It was big and difficult and wanted across time and space. And inside the box is a man. He is brilliant and mad and very dangerous. A goblin and a trickster and a wizard and none of those things.”

Kovarian looks at her, dark lips pursed into a thin, impatient line. “Why is he in the box Melody?”

“It’s his prison,” she explains. “But that’s not how the story ends.”

“Is this how it begins?”

She doesn’t know how it begins. Not until later, when a pretty woman with red hair aims a gun at her and fires.

The story, Melody decides, begins with her mother.

Or does it end there?


	8. Interlude

This time she’s not afraid to change bodies again; her current body is worn out. She is alone but for the terrified man scuttling away from her – it shouldn’t be a comfort but it is. She can fix death.

It doesn’t really hurt this time around either. There are no aliens or doctors or one-eyed witches to tell her what to do anymore. She is free. But the nights are cold and her clothes really don’t fit anymore.

For years she scurries through dumpsters for food and clothes, occasionally staying in an orphanage but Melody knows she has somewhere else to be. Knows they are looking for her.

She needs to find her parents.

But her parents won’t be born for another twenty years. It gives Melody plenty of time to plan and she does so with the determination and cunning they taught her. She will not just kill the Doctor. It will not be violence that finally halts him, it will be a story. After all, they are all just stories, even him. Hers will erase him from all of history and give all the people he hurt their lives back.

And Melody will have the family he took.


	9. Nth Time is the Charm

Melody loves her ninth body. It’s the first one that’s truly and wholly hers, the one she finally grows up in and has what other people would deem an almost normal childhood. That’s a lie of course, but that’s fine. Melody lies as easily as she breathes.

She steals and reprograms one of the Nestene duplicates to function as a parent figure to outsiders, tracks down her real parents through the stories she’s been told and maybe by hacking into the Royal Mail database.

Life is Leadworth is excruciatingly dull, even Amelia’s stories can’t quite remedy that bit and left to her own devices, Melody seeks out thrills where she can. She lies and cheats and steals her way through school. It’s stupid, she knows that – every arrest and citation makes it easier for Kovarian to find her, but Leadworth is just so _boring_. How else is she supposed to entertain herself until the Doctor finally reappears?

Of course when he does (twice!) neither he nor Amelia think twice about her and now she’s stuck in stupid Leadworth without even her best friend slash mother.

 It figures, Melody thinks, that her mother would chose him over her. She always does.


	10. Love and Lost and Lost Again

If her parents slash friends won’t take her with them she’ll damn well invite herself. She follows them to the cornfield and picks up a nice little sports car along the way. It’s not hers for long, but then neither is the triumph she feels when she finally, finally lays eyes on the Doctor.

And suddenly everything is happening so fast even Melody has trouble keeping up. They save Hitler, Hitler kills her – and oh her new body is bloody _brilliant_ – she kills the Doctor and _saves_ him.

She doesn’t regret giving up her remaining lives, what’s the point of her enforced song-and-dance routine of pain and death? She just wishes she knew why, exactly.

Melody has been raised and conditioned and trained to kill him and she had. And all that had been waiting for her when he finally died was a hollowness that threatened to swallow her whole. There had been no relief, or regret, or even the slightest sense of accomplishment or guilt.

Suddenly it’s painfully clear that Kovarian was right. She is only a weapon, a tool. There is no compassion in her hearts.

She isn’t like her parents or the Doctor. She never will be.


	11. By Any Other Name

She finds joy in beautiful things and redemption in smoothing out the raw edges of history. Over the years they forget she’s really not human or Time Lord and oh Melody is good at faking it.

So good he sort of marries her and she sort of marries him.

She becomes River Song, but she’ll always be Melody, perhaps the most advanced weapon in existence.

Sometimes he hates her for it, even when it saves his life. Sometimes she hates him for it, especially when it saves her life. But he is beautiful and mad and she might love him after all. If he keeps going on the way he is – so afraid to care – he will become like her.

For a long time that is something she looks forward to; someone to share the detachment she feels from everything. Even to her own life she is an archeologist, unobtrusively observing and carefully following the evidence of her back-to-front timeline to its foregone conclusion.

Somewhere along the way however, she realizes that his beauty lies in his ability to care – to be so _disappointed_ in humanity even after all this time.

She realizes there should never be another like her.


	12. Down Memory Lane

They’re all just stories. Words and thoughts and wishes and dreams. River Song has forgotten most of hers, or it's been taken away by a faceless enemy. She spends decades, centuries loving a man she should hate.

But long ago she wrote a story herself. A fairy tale that spans Time and Space and eventually reaches the ending she dreads. Part of her marvels at her younger self, at the intricate and complicated plan little Melody had thought off.

Standing in Amy’s bedroom, she doesn’t feel so clever. The storybook in her hand is a gift given lifetimes ago. The first chapter of a story she cannot unwrite. And by the time she remembers what’s happening, it’s already too late.

“I’m sorry, my love.”

Poetically she saves him with the one thing that has always been used against her; her memory. She’s rewritten the ending, but now River is the one slowly being erased. Her husband of so long doesn’t know who she is anymore – not yet. Melody no longer exists – or does not yet.

More memories surface. Of so much pain, so many deaths. Of Goblins and Tricksters who are exactly that. Of promises that should never be kept.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Because in my headcanon Amy got her Pandora's Box storybook from Mels


	13. All in the Family

There should never be another one like her. River knows that, but it doesn’t quite dull the pang of regret when her husband hesitantly inquires about her ability to have children. He gets so furious on her behalf, raging against the people who stole her and forged her into something she never should have been.

But if they hadn’t, if she’d been left with Amy and Rory, she would not be here. And his anger hurts, his guilt infuriates her.

He might think it is noble, to wish a normal childhood for her. It isn’t. All it is, is him desperately trying to relieve his guilt. The Doctor is selfish that way.

River Song is too. Her time is not to be rewritten.

When it all gets to be too much, she handcuffs him to the Tardis’ console and takes off to systematically bring down one Silence stronghold after another.

Turns out there are others like her. Half-formed clones and genetically mis-engineered children condemned to a childhood like hers. She frees them the only way she can and does not come out of her cell for decades after.

Some good deeds require punishment. For some, no punishment is ever enough.


	14. Chapter 14

The Doctor doesn’t die at Lake Silencio, or in the Pandorica, or in Berlin. But everybody dies and nobody knows it quite like them. She is there when he takes his last breath as she was always meant to be. His death is not by her hands, but that doesn’t make her feel any better.

She’s there for her parents’ deaths as well. Technically they don’t die then, but have already. Her mourning isn’t angry and sullen like his. River has always been more pragmatic. Instead she hops through time and space to make sure her parents will have everything they need in their new lives.

Her mother’s articles survive long after Amy has gone and Rory has a hospital wing named after him. Their legacies are far greater than they would’ve been had they stayed with the Doctor.

She meets her brother too – adopted and much more theirs than she ever was.

Inside her is still a little girl, stolen and hurt and shot by her mother. It’s hard not to feel slighted when their final moments are in concern of him – when they tell Brian of Anthony, but not of Melody.

It doesn’t matter.

(Except that it does)


	15. My Old Friend

Professor Song makes a life for herself after Stormcage. She hopes against hope that this will mean she’ll get to spend more time with her husband. But his timekeeping is as atrocious as ever and she was never that naïve. Most of her nights she spends alone.

Every time she seeks him out younger versions show up, with sharp tongues and such distrust in their eyes. It’s ironic, back-to-front even in this way, that he would trust her when he really shouldn’t and not trust her when she would give her last life for him.

It hurts.

But in one form or another, hurt has been the only constant in her life and it has settled below her skin, around her bones and become an old friend. It’s there to ground her when she sees all the people that in her timeline have died – when they don’t know who or what she is.

A macabre countdown of lasts. And sometimes she wants to cry, scream that even she does not deserve this. But her head is filled with the timelines she has so painstakingly rewritten and she knows. She deserves ever last second, every erased and yet to make memory.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One left and what would it be but The Library?


	16. You Watch Us Run

Once she broke Time itself just to tell him he was loved. Everyone deserves some form of solace at the end, especially him. Just to know that they’re not alone, that every sacrifice was not in vain. To know that they will be missed and were loved.

Death does not scare her, but dying like this; alone with her husband-to-be staring at her without the slightest hint of recognition. God, it _hurts_. And she hopes as she always does. She gave him all of her lives, broke Time for him.

Surely he will be there at her end. _Her_ Doctor.

Surely he will come to say goodbye, to tell her she is loved too.

But he isn’t and doesn’t and won’t.

And oh she is tempted to let him be the martyr so that both of them may be spared this farce of a romance.

But River Song knows better than anyone that the Universe needs him. Because of it all, she needs him too. She loves him with everything, even when she hates him and finds solace in the knowledge that for him, every line is yet to be written.

Like all good stories, hers ends with a beginning.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And that's all she wrote! 
> 
> I know I left out River in the datacore, but I still don't quite know how I feel about that. 
> 
> I hope you enjoyed reading these tiny fics. Thank you for sticking with it and for the kudos and comments, they are very much appreciated :-)


End file.
